8 Simple Ways to Provide Value to Your Clients
Adding value to the service you provide your clients can be difficult. I tend to find myself so focused on producing that I often forget that the value the client sees is more than just handing them a completed project on-time.
It’s easy to forget that we are serving people. Working remotely allows us to disconnect from the reality that on the other end of that email is a real person. The largest part of our job is listening and understanding a person’s needs.
Here are a few simple ways you can add value to your next project and create customers that love you.
1. Listen to what they have to say. Freelancers are really bad at listening. As soon a client starts talking, we have a 100 ideas we think are better. Pay attention, look the client in the eyes, engage them in the conversation, take notes, and dammit, really listen to them.
2. Understand and empathize with their pain. I had a client, a very picky client, that went through two designers before bringing me on to their project. The “job” was to re-design some assets. The actual “job” was realizing that the project manager didn’t want a re-design, but a simple re-balancing of the existing content. Their pain point was that the other designers couldn’t understand that this was the request. Both previous designers delivered completely re-designed assets.
Every client has a pain. A deadline, a boss they need to impress, investors they need to show value to, or 100 other things. After you listen to your client, your job is to find what their real pain is. That is how you are going to provide them value.
3. Say no, a lot. This is hard. It’s so much easier to promise the world to a client. It’s easy to sit in a meeting an nod your head in agreement. Don’t do it. Acknowledge that you understand their needs, but don’t agree to everything they ask of you. You’re the expert and they don’t know what they want. It’s your job to show them what they need.
4. Keep your client in the loop. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is to communicate as often as possible with a client. I’ve setup a recurring reminder every week to send a weekly status report to my clients. It’s simple, but clients love it. I also use Basecamp to provide clients with a much transparency as possible. For me, it’s important to let my clients see where I am at any point in the project.
5. Be accessible to your clients. When hiring a freelancer, there is a huge amount of trust that goes into the offer. Your clients trust you. The least we can do is to make ourselves reasonably available for them. Let them know the times you can take a phone call, or what your general working hours are. Let them know that they can get a hold of you if they need to.
6. Return emails and phone calls in a reasonable timeframe. I can’t believe the number of freelancers who won’t return a simple email or phone call. I’ve worked with freelancers that will be great early on, then not return emails or phone calls later in the project. Don’t disappear, if you’re going on vacation tell your client, and return your phone calls and emails within 24 hours.
7. It’s ok to say “I don’t know”. When I first started freelancing I was fearful that I always needed to have the right answer when I client emailed. Or even worse, if I was in a meeting and didn’t know the answer, I would make one up. It was an awful way to run my business early on. This created a communication breakdown, emails would sit for days, or I would commit to something that I had no experience with.
It’s perfectly fine to tell a client, “I don’t know, but let me find out the answer for us”.
8. Put yourself in the client’s shoes. The best freelancers know how to look at the situation from their client’s perspective. How would your client feel if you responded to their email a little quicker? Would making a custom screencast video help them understand a feature? By putting yourself in your client’s shoes, you will understand their needs and it will help you over deliver.
Doing the right thing.
All of these points lead to this philosophy I have for all my work. I am always asking myself, “Is the right thing to do?” Sometimes doing that little extra work for a discount or free is the right thing to do. Picking up the phone and calling an unhappy client is the right thing to do. There are a lot of decisions we make during our day. Are you doing the right thing?